>
> more like one or two dozen, sort of like Linux
My impression is that there are only one or two people that do much
(and have a sufficiently global view of the code to do anything but
local changes) and maybe a dozen, rather than dozens, that provide small
(unfortunately often conflicting - at a functional specification level)
tweaks.
> well the latest update was Oct 2002, and the latest patch was 16 Jan 03,
> seems they are keeping up and it is a VERY real solid well written web
> browser that does what it was designed to do exceptionally well.
I'm judging for the demands to cope with Javascript (which are largely
unreasonable) and the number of people on the lynx-dev list complaining
about it breaking with one site or another (i.e. about various
broken sites).
There are quite a lot of people on the Lynx lists reccommending other
text browsers because of the hacks they contain to cope with table
layouts, common scripting idioms, etc.
> browser that does what it was designed to do exceptionally well.
It is very good at handling well written HTML. It is pretty good at
handling HTML that hasn't been "designed", but doesn't validate.
I use it for Google, most academic and government sites (but note some
have commercial design values) and for many amateur written sites with
significant information content. It's usually totally frustrating for
e-commerce sites (I think the UK is particularly bad) and for major
company information sites.
>
> > I'd suggest that the only sensible starting point would be Mozilla.
>
> Mozilla is an excellent GRAPHICS browser
I think for what Jon is trying to do with scripting IE and Mozilla, he
should really be doing by working directly with the Mozilla code. He
is largely interested in graphics. However, the real point is that
Mozilla has a browser framework that is relatively young (and therefore
not been so damaged by large numbers of small maintenance operations)
and it has had a lot of work done on the big 2 browser technologies that
form the popular understanding of HTML.
In this particular context, I suspect Jon is after synchronised sound,
not just links to real audio (which, as I said, I believe are already
supported by either the very old MIME types handling, or the newer
ability to run an external program against a URL, rather than against
a downloaded resource.